


packing for the rest of your life

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Canon Het Relationship, Communication, F/M, Government Agencies, Kissing, Personal Growth, SHIELD, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 10:12:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1465582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gwen Stacy, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.</p>
<p>Or, Gwen Stacy makes her own choices (and she makes a few friends along the way).</p>
            </blockquote>





	packing for the rest of your life

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by the following conversation I had when The Amazing Spider-Man came out in 2012:
> 
> Friend: How was Spider-Man?  
> Me: I wish Gwen Stacy had had more agency.  
> Friend: Gwen Stacy, Agent of Shield

It comes as no surprise to Gwen that SHIELD support staff is motivated in equal parts by personal vendettas and the organization's government healthcare package. She likes fitting in, and she's a little annoyed with the resolution of her last internship, so she mentions her father's death in her essay and stresses how much she appreciates an organization with its own internal checks and balances. 

(Gwen is, in fact, not annoyed with the resolution of her last internship. She has barely given her internship much thought, outside of thinking about the role her supervisor played in her father's death, and about how useful it was that she has a remarkable tendency to think things through, unlike a certain boyfriend Gwen certainly did not mention in her application packet.)

"But you love science," Peter says when she announces that she has applied, interviewed, and received the position.

"You've got to diversify in this market," Gwen says, "but I'm working in the science division, if that's what's got you worried." She’s half distracted by the thought of her intake paperwork and half distracted by how Peter has shrugged out of half his suit and is ineffectually mending a snag. He’s using one of her old embroidery needles and what looks like her dental floss. Gwen swallows a mouthful of hot chocolate and licks whipped cream off her lip.

Peter exhibits all the classic signs of nystagmus, which means he is tracking the movement of her tongue and mouth and is about to become very distracted with the idea of kissing her, if he isn't thinking about kissing her already. Gwen flushes a little at the thought herself--Peter is kind of a clumsy kisser, but he’s getting better all the time, and she likes the way they practice every chance they get. She reaches out and puts one of her hands up high on his chest, almost at his shoulder, and feels the way his skin twitches under her touch. Peter is incredibly strong, but when it’s just the two of them, close like this, Gwen knows exactly how much influence she has over him.

"You're distracting me," Peter says. His voice has become a low, crackling mumble, strained with something that probably feels like embarrassment and arousal combined. "When you lick your mouth like that, I think—" he leans forward and kisses her, which, yes, was Gwen's general goal. She still has long moments of blank grief that creep up on her and consume her, where she misses her father desperately, and simultaneously wants Peter to hold her together or to really keep a promise and leave her alone for ten minutes, just long enough to let her process. Kissing helps push the hollow loss into a more manageable shape. Also: she likes kissing Peter. She stops thinking.

They neck intently for a long span of time—long enough that when they stop, twenty minutes before Gwen's mom is due home, Gwen is dizzy and red-cheeked and entangled in Peter's arms, and Peter is verging on incoherent, near-embarrassing enthusiasm. 

Before he goes out the window, he kisses her again. His pupils are so dilated that his eyes look black. Gwen can't bring herself to ask if he's okay to fly, so to speak; she's pretty sure they'll end up kissing again, and she has work to do.

He pulls away, falls backward off the windowsill before he really looses his grip, and Gwen licks her mouth a little in the wake; her lip gloss is smeared to hell.

She allows herself a little giggle, a shudder of delight; then she shuffles out her intake paperwork over her bedspread and reads the fine print. She is very, very good at this.

 

+

 

The thing is, Gwen had a ridiculous level of clearance at Oscorp. Working in the SHIELD intern pool is demoralizing in this respect, because as a lowly undergraduate, she mostly does spreadsheet data entry and alphabetizing—more sophisticated (but still monotonous) lab work is reserved for graduate and doctoral students. And actual scientists. 

It says something about Gwen that data entry is actually a deeply engrossing and rewarding task. She's not sure what that something is, but it's there all right. 

She ends up having lunch with an older girl who looks both startlingly pretty and remarkably bored, and who also looks like she has a passing familiarity with lab temperatures, draped in oversized sweaters as she is. Gwen's jealous; she wore thigh-highs with her skirt and it was a stupid decision. The intern pool is freezing. 

"Fresh meat!" The bored, warm girl declares when Gwen asks if she can sit with her. "Totally, free country. Bill of Rights says okay."

"I'm Gwen," Gwen says. "I'm an intern for—"

"The pool, it’s obvious. And also written on your nametag, do you actually wear that thing? It’s like the red badge of shame," the girl says. She’s right: the pool interns are required to wear red name badges on lanyards at all time, which is more demoralizing than the data entry. "I'm Darcy. I make pop tarts and skew metadata. Last week I plotted a graph, shit was real."

This sounds like Gwen's project, only with better snacks. Gwen is impressed; Darcy either has been an intern forever, or she is a graduate student (Gwen's met a few grad students already, and granted, the difference between these two camps is negligible).

Darcy, it turns out, is way less qualified to work at SHIELD than Gwen, but she is exponentially better at not caring about it and doing an amazing job anyway, which Gwen appreciates. She had an inkling that this kind of internship involved incredibly tedious, simple work, and that only a vastly over-educated brain was up to the ask of doing it for little or no pay. 

They keep having lunch together—the internship is every day, all summer long, and there are options to work weekends once school starts if Gwen becomes certifiably insane—and after a couple weeks, Darcy pulls a few strings and gets Gwen transferred to her own department, where the researchers are working on something to do with advanced physics. If not for the sure knowledge of Darcy’s political science degree, Gwen’s own familiarity with biology might seem limiting, but Darcy (and Bruce, a rather senior Ph.D. who apparently does not know how to effectively delegate or dissuade under-qualified but determined interns from interfering with his work) assures Gwen that it “literally takes all kinds.” Gwen’s relieved to have switched projects; the intern pool in the general science division is mind-numbingly boring, and the guy at the workstation across form her keeps trying to get her number. She thinks he might be trying to send her a computer virus. 

“If it’s any consolation, Miss Stacy,” Bruce says, a week into her transfer, “Biology makes fools of us all, one way or another.” He bustles with a data table and pinches at the screen of his StarkPad, blowing up the text so he doesn’t need his reading glasses.

Gwen’s pretty sure Bruce isn’t referring to the gritty business of living, or to the current quandary her boyfriend has gotten embroiled in, but she appreciates the gesture. 

“Plus, Wikipedia totally has a page for ‘biophysics,’ so interdisciplinary interning is within your grasp,” Darcy chimes in, as always willing to lighten the mood and disseminate information. She’s currently placing bets on how long it will take Bruce to ask her if she’s seen his glasses, which are at present on his desk, under a file containing Darcy’s intake paperwork, which he was supposed to sign a week ago. “But more important right now is your input on whether or not I should move to Brooklyn.”

“Do you hate yourself?” Gwen asks. “Think of your commute.”

“Think of the bars,” Darcy croons. “I mean, I hate PBR, but I bet I could find somewhere cool. Like, with a billiards table.”

“Think of the hipsters.” Gwen’s underage and fond enough of rules that she doesn’t think of bars as an important geographic consideration.

“Think of the Treats Truck.” 

Darcy has a point. Gwen loves her boyfriend and all, but she would leave him for Kim Ima and her brownies in a hot second, and she says so.

“Cypress Hills, here I come!” Darcy whoops, and fires off a series of text messages. Bruce looks resigned to the noise and shuffles to the adjoining lab, presumably looking—still—for his reading glasses. 

“Cypress Hills is nowhere near the Treats Truck,” Gwen says, “like, at all. Don’t you think you should give him his glasses?” 

“I hate roommates and I can afford this,” Darcy says, “So long as the guy on Craigslist doesn’t jack up the price or try to kill me. And if Bruce was on top of his paperwork, or if he knew where his desk was located, he wouldn’t have these problems.”

“Well,” Gwen says, because there is no reasoning with people who are from the west and are used to distance being measured by hours in a car instead of by subway transfers, “let me know when you move in, I’ll bring my boyfriend to help with the boxes.” She feels exceptionally adult as she makes this offer.

“Thanks,” Darcy says. “I was just gonna bully some of the junior agents in security, but if you don’t mind trekking out, I’ll invite actual friends and we can eat too much takeout.” Her phone chimes and she turns the brunt of her attention to texting. “I haven’t had good Mexican food since I moved here.” 

Gwen has visited the neighborhood Darcy’s moving to, and isn’t sure how to break the news that Darcy may never have good Mexican food again.

 

+

 

Darcy ends up moving into the Craigslist apartment at the end of the month. Gwen drags Peter along with her to at least attend the party (Gwen got the sense that Darcy didn’t actually need to outsource her moving, no matter that she lived on the third floor), taking a substantial detour in order to stop at the Treats Truck Stop in Carroll Gardens and purchase an enormous box of goodies.

“How many people are gonna be at this party?” Peter asks when Gwen shoves the parcel into his hands.

“I am not sure,” she ponders. “But she can always freeze the leftovers.”

Peter, who is something like professionally hungry these days, grants her a skeptical look, and Gwen remembers that he’s seen how fast she eats brownies.

“It’s a gesture of goodwill, Peter,” she says, and he laughs, bumps her hip with his own—she stumbles a little at the impact—but doesn’t challenge her. 

The party is fun—Darcy has most of her furniture moved, but Gwen still ends up sitting on an unpacked box of sweaters—and Gwen is surprised at all the people in attendance she recognizes from her internship. Bruce is there, looking sheepish and quiet and ready to leave, as are Darcy’s other internship supervisors Jane and Erik, as well as Jane’s overlarge and improbably named boyfriend, who immediately takes a liking to Peter. 

Another woman, probably an agent for all she’s wearing an old band t-shirt and dark leggings, sits down on the box across from Gwen, which is no surprise, as Gwen made sure she was sitting close to her box from the Treats Truck. She’s chewing happily on a raspberry brownie when the other woman peers first into the box and then at Gwen.

“What’s good?” she asks. Gwen takes pity on her, because she has the lean and hungry look of a person who hasn’t had a decent carbohydrate in months, and swallows her mouthful in order to more articulately point out which confections are her favorites. 

The woman—Maria—settles on half of an edge piece of a spicy cinnamon brownie. Like Gwen’s mother, she appears to have some understanding of moderation. Gwen lives in fear of the day when she develops an understanding of her own. 

Gwen was not raised by wolves, so she makes conversation and learns that the woman is named Maria, and is indeed employed at the SHIELD initiative, though she avoids saying her job description so deftly that Gwen knows it’s classified information. Again, not raised by wolves, Gwen chatters benignly about her internship for a minute before she asks Maria where she’s located.

“Harlem, officially,” Maria smiles, rescuing the other half of her brownie from the box. “But I end up spending more time traveling for work than I spend in my apartment. I’m taking a personal day to get lost at the Met next week, though; have you been recently?”

By the time Peter escapes from Darcy, Thor, and what Gwen is pretty sure is a lot of alcohol, Gwen and Maria have exchanged contact information and made plans to meet for lunch (Gwen promised to bring more brownies, and hopes that the food truck ban in the city won’t make this a difficult prospect). Because Gwen didn’t get snookered into drinking a Boilermaker, she carefully enters the information from Maria’s card into her phone, bids farewell to their hostess (Darcy blows a kiss and throws a lukewarm empanada at them, which Peter barely catches), and graciously makes sure Peter is pointed in the right direction to catch the subway home. She lets him keep the empanada; hopefully it’ll help, though she personally doubts it.

 

+

 

Time passes in the way it always has: slowly and then all at once, to borrow a turn of phrase. Gwen is halfway through her senior year and at least four years into a full-on relationship with Peter, who her mother despairs of, mostly because even though he’s wickedly funny and intelligent, Peter has so many crime-fighting extra-curricular activities on his plate that he may never finish college. Gwen, meanwhile, has a paid assistantship at SHEILD and is thinking about grad school. (That last part is a lie; She is talking about the application process with every supervisor she’s worked with who is not also in a psych ward and Bruce has agreed to write one of her letters of recommendation.) 

The grad school thing is an open secret at work; Gwen hates verbally committing to an application process before she has all of the details and she’s a big fan of knowing her options. So much of her life is subject to whim: she controls what she can and hopes for the best.

“I mean, no offense,” she tells Darcy, who is no longer an intern but whose formal job description still fails most of the support staff and, indeed, payroll, “but I do not view you as a career role model.”

“I’d be doing something wrong if you did,” Darcy gloats. She has a terrible habit of not looking at Gwen when she talks; right now she’s scrolling mindlessly on her iPhone. If Gwen were an unkind person, or if she didn’t know Darcy well at all, she’d think Darcy was merely trawling through icanhazcheezburger.com; knowing Darcy as well as she does, though, Gwen’s pretty sure Darcy is actively reading someone’s graduate thesis on LOLcats and their role in dialectical shifts in the English language.

“Is this like how you take pride in living in a terrible neighborhood?”

Darcy ignores the barb and shuts off her phone. “Girlfriend, allow me to offer some advice I hope you will take: look at some job lists before you sign away for a master’s degree.”

“I’m applying for a Ph.D.,” Gwen reminds her friend, though she refrains from pointing out that she’s in the hard sciences, where there is still, very occasionally, funding to be had, “but I appreciate the advice.”

Darcy crows happily. “And my high school class voted me ‘most likely to only be consulted about sexual terminology’!”

“I have never asked you a question that falls into that category.”

“I try never to ask Darcy questions,” Maria says, sitting down at their table. Gwen startles a little; over the years, Maria has developed a habit of appearing out of nowhere, contributing to a conversation for approximately six minutes, and then disappearing. Gwen strongly suspects this is what counts as Maria’s social life.

“So much for being a valued member of this team,” Darcy says, turning her phone back on. “And you’re missing out, I have an encyclopedic recollection of sexual positions, associated terminology, and alternative birth control methods. I’m not just a pretty face.”

Maria ignores Darcy and turns to face Gwen. “Grad school?” she asks.

“It’s an option,” Gwen allows. “I’ve assisted with enough research here that I have a few ideas for a thesis, and I’m a strong candidate for several grant opportunities.”

“If you remain in this field,” Maria remarks, “you may find yourself working in favor of an agenda, rather than for the pursuit of scientific knowledge.”

“Everyone has an agenda,” Gwen says. 

Maria stands and makes to leave; out of everyone who eats in the cafeteria, Gwen is fairly sure Maria is one of the few who actually separates out her recyclables from the trash. “Might as well work for the devil you know,” she says. “Talk to the coordinator for your research section; tell him I sent you.”

 

*

 

In short: Gwen gets scouted by SHEILD, which is great and also terrible. Peter can’t decide if he’s happy for her or horrified that she’s aligned herself with a shadowy government organization. Gwen can’t decide if she’s annoyed or flattered by his emotional meltdown.

“Calm down,” she tells him reasonably. “It’s not like my getting a job is synonymous with me giving up your identity. I’ve already interned there for years; it’s as close as I can get to a known quantity.”

No response.

Gwen sighs mightily and wishes she’d thought to have this conversation in public, where her boyfriend might not have been able to sulk so obviously. “I get dental insurance,” she says. “I’d be crazy not to take it.”

“You get dental insurance because you’ll probably get your teeth knocked out in a hazardous work situation!” Peter snaps back. He does not, however, come in from her widow ledge. Gwen lives eighteen floors up and someone is going to notice him if he doesn’t come back inside.

“If it’s my winning smile you’re worried about, I hear they’ve made great strides with dental implants.”

At that, Peter whips himself back into the room. “Look, it’s not funny that almost everyone I’ve ever cared about has died, so excuse me for worrying about you!”

“Peter,” Gwen says, and she says it gently, without anger, “Peter, you beautiful Neanderthal, this is not a death sentence. It is a job. I appreciate your concern, but your inability to look at this situation clinically is a problem. How is it that I can accept your highly dangerous and also illegal job, and you can’t accept that I might want a legitimate and intellectually-stimulating career option?” She does not say: _I miss my father_ , nor does she say, _this isn’t your decision_. Right now, Gwen is twenty-two years old, and she has loved Peter long enough to know that his concerns are, in a way, legitimate, the way the concerns of a partner are always legitimate: this situation is altering how they function as a unit.

Gwen’s tone, an act of love in and of itself, settles Peter enough that he finally sits down and actually looks at her. “I’m worried,” he says. And then, voice cracking like it hasn’t in years, he says, “I’m scared.” 

Gwen sits down across from him. She doesn’t touch him, and she doesn’t promise that they can fix this, but she does say, “why don’t you tell me what you’re worried about, and together we can work towards a solution.” 

It’s progress.

 

+

 

Eventually, Gwen accepts the job. When she signs the last of her intake paperwork, her senior officer hands over her badge and security key. The plastic cards are, happily, not red; the key is taupe and the badge is a terrible neon yellow, to denote her very low clearance level. Aside from that—not much changes.

Gwen is not naïve: she expects that, too, will change. Peter still isn’t happy about it, but even he will be relieved at the level of red tape involved before she gets anywhere near an interesting/dangerous project (“the two aren’t necessarily linked, Peter,” she’d reminded him, but then he’d taken his shirt off and started kissing her, and. Well. Gwen is only human. They’ll have that conversation later, and probably more than once). So far, she signs in at a different security kiosk in the morning, and her computer login got changed. The work itself won’t start until she’s trained, and since Bruce disappeared off to India for the rest of the quarter, Gwen might be training herself.

Maria takes her out for drinks after Gwen clocks out, to celebrate.

“Everything you hoped and dreamed?” she asks.

Gwen thinks for a moment before answering, twirling the little pink umbrella the bartender had added to her cocktail. “I get the feeling,” she says, finally, “that I’ll find out whether or not this is a mistake right after it’s too late to change careers.”

“I knew you were a smart girl,” Maria says. She’s drinking a scotch that’s almost old enough to order itself off a menu; over the years since Gwen met her at Darcy’s moving-in party, Maria’s gotten harder to read. It reminds Gwen a little of how her father looked right after he’d come home from work: like maybe the world was resting on his shoulders, but it was choice that’s he’d made all on his own. It’s a feeling that Gwen would like to have about herself: the sense that all of her burdens are due to choices she has made herself, for good or for ill.

“Further up and further in,” she says, and holds up her glass; Maria doesn’t smile at that, but she does clink her lowball against it.

 

+

 

When Gwen gets home later that night, Peter’s waiting at the window. He slithers across the sill when she lets him in, belly-down and graceless. It’s a gentle reminder that for all his abilities, Peter is still a boy; for a long time, that was all he was. 

“How was work?” he asks, because he’s trying, and she loves that about him.

“We’ll see,” she says, offering a hand he doesn't need to get up off of her floor. One he's standing, she kisses him; it’s her turn to approach. “It’s a ‘take one day at a time’ thing.”

“You’re gonna be great,” he says. He doesn’t look at her when he says it; Gwen knows he means it anyway.

“C’mon,” she tells him. “Let’s go brush our teeth. Tomorrow’s a big day.”


End file.
